Publishing Calendarr on F-Droid

Two independent channels — do both in parallel:

Own repo (live today): you build + sign the APK, generate a small catalog, host it at a URL; users add that URL in the F-Droid app.
Official F-Droid (~weeks to be accepted, then automatic): F-Droid builds + signs from source and lists it in the catalog every F-Droid user already has.

The app is GPLv3 and has no non-free dependencies (no Play Services / Firebase), so it is F-Droid-eligible. Store-listing metadata lives in fastlane/metadata/….

⚠️ Signatures differ between the two channels: your own repo serves APKs signed with your keystore; the official build is signed with F-Droid's key. A user can't seamlessly update from one to the other (reinstall once). To unify later, set up Reproducible Builds so F-Droid ships your signature.

A) Your own repo (fdroid.scarriffle.com)

The repo is just static files (APKs + a signed index). Host + generate it on an always-on Debian/Ubuntu LXC on Proxmox, and keep the APK build/signing on the Mac (where the keystore lives).

One-time: set up the LXC

# Debian/Ubuntu LXC — fdroidserver + the Android build-tools it reads APKs with.
apt update
apt install -y fdroidserver android-sdk-build-tools default-jdk
# (if the distro has no android-sdk-build-tools pkg, install Android command-line
#  tools and `sdkmanager "build-tools;34.0.0"`, then point $ANDROID_HOME at it)

# Create the repo once (generates config.yml + an index-signing key)
mkdir -p /srv/fdroid && cd /srv/fdroid
fdroid init

Serving: you already run a reverse proxy, so it terminates TLS for fdroid.scarriffle.com. Either point the reverse proxy straight at the /srv/fdroid directory (no webserver on the LXC needed — just fdroidserver to generate), or run a tiny static server on the LXC over plain HTTP and forward to it, e.g. darkhttpd /srv/fdroid --port 8080 (or caddy file-server / python3 -m http.server). Only requirement: the public URL is reachable over HTTPS (the reverse proxy does that); it's plain static file serving, no directory listing needed.

Each release

# 1. On the MAC: build a SIGNED release APK (F-Droid repos serve APKs, not AABs)
./gradlew assembleRelease            # → app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release.apk

# 2. Copy APK + store metadata to the LXC
scp app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release.apk  root@lxc:/srv/fdroid/repo/
rsync -a "fastlane/metadata/android/"  root@lxc:/srv/fdroid/metadata/com.scarriffle.calendarr/

# 3. On the LXC: regenerate the signed index
cd /srv/fdroid && fdroid update -c --pretty

Users then open F-Droid → Settings → Repositories → + → https://fdroid.scarriffle.com/fdroid/repo → Calendarr appears and auto-updates.

Keep the OLD apks in repo/ too (users on older versions still update). For each new version bump versionCode/versionName in app/build.gradle.kts first.

(Fully hands-off alternative: build on the LXC too — then copy the keystore + keystore.properties there and run assembleRelease in a checkout. The Mac split above avoids putting the signing key on the server.)

B) Official F-Droid (fdroiddata)

Prereqs: the SourceCode repo in fdroid/com.scarriffle.calendarr.yml must be publicly clonable (make the Gitea repo public, or mirror to GitHub/GitLab and point Repo:/SourceCode: there), and a signed git tag v1.1.0 must exist (created for this release).

Fork https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata.
Add our recipe as metadata/com.scarriffle.calendarr.yml (copy from fdroid/com.scarriffle.calendarr.yml in this repo).
Optional local sanity check: fdroid lint com.scarriffle.calendarr and fdroid build -v -l com.scarriffle.calendarr.
Open a Merge Request. F-Droid reviews, builds and publishes (this first review is the slow part — weeks). Afterwards, AutoUpdateMode picks up each new v<versionName> tag automatically.

Screenshots (both channels)

Add PNG/JPG screenshots to fastlane/metadata/android/en-US/images/phoneScreenshots/ (and de-DE/…), named 1.png, 2.png, … They then show on the F-Droid listing.

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